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New opportunities for open access publishing

In April I noted the recent announcements from major publishers about new open access journals. This trend continues with notable transitions to open access business models as well as completely new journals offering faster publication, higher acceptance rates or new forms of peer-review. If you are a researcher wanting to take advantage of increased visibilty for research outputs, particularly in the sciences, it may be worth considering submitting to these journals.

Open Biology, the first fully open access journal from the Royal Society will accept papers of 'scientific excellence, importance and originality'. Costs are covered by their article processing charge of £1200.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust have announced a new open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The journal (as yet unnamed) aims to publish the very best peer reviewed research entirely free to all readers. With support from these organisations, there will be no author fees for at least 3 years. Read more about the new journal.

Polar Research, the international peer-reviewed journal, moved from Wiley to Co-Action Publishing in January 2011, becoming fully open access. With support from the Norwegian Polar Institute there are no author fees and all content is freely available. Co-Action publishes a growing series of journals in various disciplines.

The Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation has launched QScience Connect on its QScience platform. The first peer reviewed articles covering all fields will be published in September 2011, with authors retaining copyright under a Creative Commons licence.

Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing Group published its first open access articles in June. The article processing charge (APC) for 2011 is £890.
NPG will continue to publish their subscription and 'hybrid' journals, and have also released a position statement about open access publishing which emphasises their commitment to 'green' as well as 'gold' OA:

"NPG has a liberal self-archiving policy for all authors of original research papers. We encourage self-archiving of the authors’ accepted version, with a release date of 6 months post-publication. This is compatible with all major funder access policies and mandates."

Sage Open covers the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and has an introductory rate of $195. Articles are published continuously following peer review, with an additional feature allowing comments from readers.

Physical Review X from the American Physical Society is another journal with a broad scope and an APC of $1500

A new EU Horizon 2020 project has been announced, entitled High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure, or HIRMEOS for short. We've written on this blog numerous times about open access books, see previous posts here and here, and from what is known about this project it certainly could be a very important next step in advancing open access long-form publishing in the Humanities and Social sciences.

The Swiss National Science Foundation and swissuniversities have come together to agree a national strategy aiming for all publications financed with Swiss public money to be accessible free of charge by 2024.

The joint principles and strategy are outlined in a document published on 31 Jan 2017, which states "all stakeholders, politicians, higher education institutions (and their libraries) and funders have to join forces to pursue common goals" - including aligning existing OA policies and supporting new OA publishing models.